Like any red-blooded American boy, I have a life long interest in War.
But one war has always proven especially elusive and uninteresting to me,
World War One. Perhaps it is due to the absence of great literature
or movies; other than Sergeant
York with Gary Cooper, what little art exists is all anti-WWI--the
books: Good-bye
to All That (Robert Graves), All
Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque), & the
movies: Paths
of Glory, All
Quiet on the Western Front, Gallipoli,
etc. Perhaps the senseless slaughter of the trenches is too off-putting.
Perhaps it is simple ambivalence about the cause or our participation.
Whatever the case, it has just never captured my imagination. So
the news that our greatest living Military Historian, John Keegan, was
taking a whack at it, raised the possibility that here at last would be
the book that would spark the flame of interest.

Alas, despite a yeoman effort by Keegan, who has produced an enormously
readable and mercifully brief account that ranges from origins of the war
to armaments to battles to politics to consequences, even this was not
enough. In fact, there's a certain sense of noblesse oblige about
Keegan's effort. One senses that he is writing more from a feeling
of obligation than of interest or passion.

In his conclusion he says of the war:

The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest
literature in military history; no brave trumpets
sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded
to death on the featureless plains of Picardy
and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders
who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the
war's political outcome scarcely bears contemplation:
Europe ruined as a centre of world
civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through
defeat into godless tyrannies, bolshevik or
Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies
counting not at all in their cruelty to
common and decent folk. All that was worst
in the century which the First World War had opened,
the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of
the people by provinces, the extermination of racial
outcasts, the persecution of ideology's intellectual
and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic
minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties,
the destruction of parliaments and the
elevation of commissars, gauletiers and warlords
to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in
the chaos it left behind.

We should be thankful that he has given us the only book we'll ever
need to read about this dreariest of all wars.